'Submission' by Michel Houellebecq

 I had already made up my mind about this novel but as one does I googled reviews to see what the general opinion of it was.  Knausgaard’s review was the only one I read.  He was worried that he might suffer the dispiriting experience of meeting greatness that he could not hope to match.  Don’t worry Karl Ove, he’s just as bad as you are, but yours is an exhaustive sincere badness,his is a cynical 'what if and what about it if what if'.  Bad faith as a writer is recognisable in the narrator’s mewling whimper of 'I’m gone to the end of the night and I’m all burnt out'.  Francois  you never caught fire and now you’re 44, a senior lecturer in Paris 3, a Huysmans specialist.  That where the lie begins and it’s a thin lie.  There’s a lot of mentioning but no credible insight into the life of a writer that he is expert in having got his Phd. on the basis of a 700 + page dissertation.  (Is that legal?) The course of Huysmans life is the template for the fiction, decadent to Catholic and libertine to  Muslim, the stewing in dim religious light of the fin-de-siecle aesthete and meditation before the Black Madonna of Rocamadour of the modern academic.

“Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin – the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus – who looked nothing like a baby, more like an adult or even an old man – sat on her lap, equally erect; his eyes were closed, too, his face sharp, wise and powerful, and he wore a crown of his own. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their postures. This was not the baby Jesus; this was already the king of the world. His serenity and the impression he gave of spiritual power – of intangible energy – were almost terrifying.”

The Graham Greene guide to ugly churches, rain and bad food is truer than this sentimental appreciation of iconography.

Before he left for Paris he went back to the shrine:

The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shrivelled and puny. After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the car park.

Huysmans goes back to Catholicism and Francois submits to Islam.  This is where the realism becomes exceptionally thin and veers towards outright satire.  One might imagine a grand coalition which puts Islam in power in France on one condition - that they leave the cheese and wine alone.  A Vichyoise Islam is allowable on those terms.

The word collaboration is mentioned once:

Many people still considered it slightly shameful to bow down to the new Saudi regime, as if it were an act ofcollaboration, so to speak; by gathering together, the teachers showed strength in numbers and gave one another courage. They took special satisfaction in welcoming a new colleague into their midst.

Saudi money is running the universities and to teach there you have to convert.  Considering the bizarre beliefs that allow the gender that you identify with to be your operative sex which has taken hold in American universities the simple formula that signifies your submission to Allah is wholesome.  The salary is improved too.

What do I really think of it?  It’s readable.  The food is good.